Real-life fakers: meet John Noland and his team of animatronics artists

This article was taken from the April 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.

Transporting robotic creatures across borders has its own hierarchy of difficulty. "I've done it lots of times in Europe: squirrels; badgers; frogs; even a cow," says John Nolan, who creates animatronics in his east London studio. "I take them as hand luggage." A flight to the US proved trickier, however. "It was two premature babies, with all the wires poking out." They were for a film, The Identical, starring Ray Liotta; each had 30 motors and a breathing mechanism, and took three months to create. "But we got them through."

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Once, I had to buy a dead rat and take its skin off, just to look at the muscle structureJohn Nolan

Nolan, 33, specialises in the uncanny. Since graduating from the London College of Fashion in 2002, he's built shrunken heads and a baby Voldemort for the

Harry Potter films, 3.5-metre-tall shaggy suits for Where the Wild Things Are and a troll for the WitchWorld theme park in Sweden.

A morbid curiosity helps: he keeps a shelf full of anatomy books to make sure his robots' movements look natural. "Once, I had to buy a dead rat and take its skin off, just to look at the muscle structure." The knowledge gleaned from that dissection led to Nolan's Cheddar, a short film he directed in 2010 about a bench-pressing mouse. Fans put the video on YouTube; after nearly three million views it's still responsible for 80 percent of all Nolan's commissions, which recently include promos for Death Grips and Gazelle Twin. Just be thankful he's busy: "It's a way of channelling aggression and an excitement for breaking and rebuilding things."

This article was first published in the April 2013 issue of WIRED magazine